by Mark Demetrius
Worth: $19.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Volodymyr Kravchuk, Alexia Depicker, Daria Plakhtii
Intro:
… a sci-fi film for people who don’t like sci-fi, clever in the way great Twilight Zone episodes were clever, and truly sublime.
This is a film that starts well and just gets better and better. Made under unimaginably difficult circumstances – writer-director Pavlo Ostrikov and Co. were halfway through it when Russia invaded the Ukraine – it’s largely a one-man show. The protagonist Andriy (a superb Volodymyr Kravchuk) is an astronaut on a four-year-long routine mission transporting radioactive waste to Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons. His only ‘companion’ is Maxim, a computer whose function is to cheer him up. This becomes somewhat more of a challenge when Andriy finds out that Earth has just exploded and he is supposedly the only human being left alive.
Apocalyptic though such a plot device might be, it’s handled – for a while – in a droll, sardonic and very funny way that recalls John Carpenter’s satirical 1974 debut Dark Star. But the story segues seamlessly into something entirely serious when it becomes apparent that there is another survivor – French woman Catherine (Alexia Depicker) – and she’s located near Saturn. What follows is sad, sweet, poignant and all about the desperate human need for connection.
U Are The Universe is an exquisite character-driven movie, simple and modest in its style yet complex in its, er, universal themes. It’s a sci-fi film for people who don’t like sci-fi, clever in the way great Twilight Zone episodes were clever, and truly sublime.
